A thin film transistor (hereinafter, referred to as a “TFT”) and an electronic circuit using the thin film transistor are manufactured by laminating various types of thin films of a semiconductor, an insulating material, a conductive material, and the like over a substrate and, then, appropriately forming a predetermined pattern with a photolithography technique. The photolithography technique means a technique of transferring a pattern of a circuit or the like formed over a surface of a transparent flat plane referred to as a photomask by using a material which does not transmit light onto a targeted substrate by utilizing light, and the technique has widely been used in a manufacturing step of a semiconductor integrated circuit or the like.
In a manufacturing step employing a conventional photolithography technique, it is necessary to perform a multi-stage step including light exposure, developing, baking, peeling-off, and the like only for treating a mask pattern which is formed by using a photosensitive organic resin material referred to as a photoresist. Therefore, as the number of times of the photolithography step is increased more, a manufacturing cost is inevitably increased more. In order to improve such problems as described above, it has been tried to manufacture the TFT by reducing the number of the photolithography step (for example, Reference 1: Japanese Patent Laid-Open No. H11-251259).
However, in the technique disclosed in Reference 1, only a part of the photolithography step which is carried out plural times in a TFT manufacturing step is replaced by a printing method and no contribution is made to a drastic reduction in the number of steps. Further, a light exposing apparatus to be used for transferring the mask pattern in the photolithography technique transfers a pattern of from several micrometers to 1 micrometer or less by equivalent projection light exposure or reduction projection light exposure. It is theoretically difficult for the light exposing apparatus to expose a large area substrate having a side of more than 1 meter to light all at once from a technical standpoint.